


Elwood City

by Calyps0



Category: Arthur (Cartoon)
Genre: Angst, Arthur PBS show, Arthur/Buster if you squint, Character Study, College, Coming of Age, Mark Brown please don’t sue me, No I’m not honoring refunds if I inadvertently ruin your childhood, Rarepair, Yes Really, Yes you read the tags correctly, angsty, buster pov, by accident, in terms of rarepairs this fic is probably the equivalent of happening upon a shiny Deoxys, it’s just a fun fact, my favorite Pokémon is Gulpin, that has nothing to do with fic though, this fic is not fun though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-08-17
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:46:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25963072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Calyps0/pseuds/Calyps0
Summary: The year flies by, like the model planes he used to build in the dewy-sweetness of his backyard. He’d saved up his allowance for months to get one—there one moment, gone in the blink of an eye.
Relationships: Buster Baxter/Arthur Timothy Read
Comments: 10
Kudos: 18





	Elwood City

It is _easy-easy-easy_ —sweet as those treehouse summers and those Sugar Bowl afternoons—where what they can’t say in cafeteria lines or in soft-creased class notes they _can_ disclose in the darkness-safe cocoons of their bedsheets, trading secrets in the slant of flashlights and their breath along the invisible line of matching walkie talkies.

It’s the _distance_ , Buster realizes later, that makes him able to confess all the things that can’t be managed face-to-face.

But it’s also the _closeness_ , too. The walkies don’t work outside of a certain range—eight miles or so is where they short out. They tested it once, each marking the point where the lines fizzled into static, when Arthur had gone on a weekend trip—a wedding, he thinks it was. Eight miles, as if they are binary stars circling in orbit around each other, as if they are always eight miles and a second away.

\---

 _“I believe in aliens,”_ he announces to Arthur one night when they are eleven—not quite old enough to relinquish the habit of these nighttime calls but old enough to want to shorten them, if only for the opportunity to explore the newness of their bodies in the privacy of themselves. He wonders what he’d encounter if he indulged the strange tingles at the waistband of his sleep shorts. He’d like to ask Arthur about them.

He doesn’t.

Arthur chuckles. In the metallic echo of the walkie, it’s an unappealing sound. “I know you do, Buster,” he says.

“No,” Buster insists, because this is important, “I mean I _really_ believe in aliens.”

“Ok. You _really_ believe in aliens. I get it. Cool.”

Buster sighs. “I think they’re like us,” he says looking up at the ceiling from the bunk bed he’s never shared with anyone else. “Maybe not green or tentacled or freaky-looking. Maybe they’re just kids who look up at the same stars and wonder the same things we do.”

Arthur shifts on his end of the line. Buster can hear the creak of bedsprings. It does something very strange to his pulse.

“What are they wondering about, do you suppose?” Arthur asks.

Buster swallows. There’s the static of the walkie like the static under his skin. He feels dizzy even though he’s lying down.

 _“Everything,”_ he says, and the static continues.

\---

He still believes in aliens a scant seven years later, but people no longer entertain the _off_ -ness of the kid who as an eight-year-old postulated the planet of origin of every teacher he encountered and walked around with sandwiches in his pocket or pizza stuffed in his locker, but they didn’t know that he was storing it just in case, see? That one week his mother—he’d only found out later—hadn’t been able to pay for rent and groceries at the same time and so they’ve never been strangers to food insecurity, and he doesn’t let people see the hall closet when they come over because it’s packed like a doomsday bunker. So he doesn’t mind stale food or have the luxury of harboring preferences because any food is better than none.

He wonders if aliens have to deal with overdue bills one night after a dinner of microwave meals and High C. His mother always looks embarrassed in line at the market with the food stamps pressed into her fist but he doesn’t understand why that should be, and anyway if they don’t have enough money why can’t they just ask his dad for some?

He turns over in bed and decides it doesn’t matter.

\---

He’d never really thought about it too much, but there’s a caste system that defined his childhood, one that wasn’t a family of five and a dog and white picket fence, but instead an apartment on a editor’s budget and a father who only pops in one or twice a year with wishes from whatever country he’s visiting and a check for a couple hundred bucks a month.

(His mother keeps the checks in a drawer, he discovers when his is sixteen, uncashed.

They keep coming, anyway.)

\---

In third grade, eight miles becomes _thousands._

Twelve months pass by without his best friend. No games of Go Fish, no walkie talkie chats, not even the familiar clack of checkers on a worn wooden board.

He thought that would be the worst that he’d ever have to endure.

High school surprises him.

And yeah, he’ll admit it. He loved every second of that trip. The fancy food, the hotels, the accents. All the places and things and pictures, so many pictures.

But now he’s grown and it’s been four years since his last contact with his dad and he wonders sometimes if maybe he had only wanted to spend some time with his son to decide if it was worth it, only to find out that it wasn’t, so he dropped him off back home and washed his hands clean of him and that had been that.

His parents hadn’t even seen each other at the airport. He had left his mother behind at the TSA scanners and met his father a hallway away. He’d felt like a hot potato—like at those father-son picnics he only attended once, the one his father had thrown money at with balloon rides, but he’s grown up enough to admit that he wishes his dad was there to do a two-legged race and an egg toss and to hoist him up on his shoulders to watch the fireworks, even though he would have protested that he was too old.

The apartment is small but there are only the two of them. It’s not as if he has brothers or sisters, not that he’d know what to do with them, but Arthur is like a brother enough anyway.

Arthur has a sister, though—one he complains about—and a father, too—one who embarrasses him with increasingly outlandish culinary dishes—but who cares?

They stayed.

They loved him enough to not leave him, and Buster is self-aware enough by now to admit that part of the strength of their friendship is based in jealousy, in a vicarious want for what he will never have.

Bless his mother. He winces for what he put her through when he was a child. She had picked him up at the terminal a year later with watery eyes, but it was only when they got home that she broke down sobbing. And he had cried, too—because he was eight and he had missed his mother, but the older you get, he realizes, the more deeply you feel these things. So if his heart aches like this now, what must she have gone through for those months he had seen the Eiffel Tower and she had been in Elwood alone? What days of hers had been spent alone when he chose another person over her? And when he got home he had only made it worse, deciding to spend a scant few hours with her—mostly spent showering and unpacking and napping—and then going to visit his friend instead.

He curses his past self: the selfish eight year old boy. Selfish is what he’s always been— _selfish, selfish, selfish._

He can do selfish, though. He can _want._ It doesn’t mean he’ll get it. After all, all he ever wanted was a father.

Well, if wishes were horses, he supposes, all men would ride.

\---

BB, Arthur has taken to calling him. BB, for Buster Baxter. The nickname had surfaced somewhere around fifth grade and stuck like a bad penny.

He doesn’t mind much. It makes him sound cool. Less of the loser crowd. But for reasons he’s still not quite certain about, he likes it when Arthur calls him by his first name.

\---

The name of course he’d gotten from a grandfather, one he’s never met. There’s something about that, he thinks. Irony, or something like it. He hears the whispers from teachers and parents alike—at social functions, on the sidewalk, even in the same room when they think he isn’t listening. He needs a father figure, some positive male influence. He’s in a big brother program for a whole summer with some cool high school kid with a car and frosted tips. The kid’s not family, though.

Buster looks up at the stars. If wishes were horses, he thinks again. There’s a constellation of a horse. Pegasus. He wishes on it.

It doesn’t come true.

\---

He stays connected with Arthur all throughout high school—the public one he attends across the street and the private one Arthur goes to half an hour away. But they have the weekends and movies and bike rides, and _now_ he knows what happens after exploring the skin between his hips but they don’t discuss that now, either. Instead they go to the pool during the summer and they talk about girls—which he finds strange for reasons he can’t quite pinpoint—but Arthur is still there at night and in the mornings and in the summers and he still lives within those eight miles so he is really always a second away. And sure their talks get less frequent. Arthur will get tired of him, he’s sure. He’ll move on to new friends and Buster will be stuck here in this same town in the public high and after that community college while his father drinks away a veritable fortune on vermouth and cabernet.

But it’s summer, and he’s gonna be a senior next year, and he doesn’t want to think about any of that just yet.

\---

The year flies by, like the model planes he used to build in the dewy-sweetness of his backyard. He’d saved up his allowance for months to get one—there one moment, gone in the blink of an eye.

\---

The acceptance is…unexpected.

To say the least.

He opens the official-looking letter on thick cardstock—expensive, he registers idly, like noticing a penny on the ground—and expects another rejection.

(He gets as far as _Congratu_ — and his brain shuts down completely.)

It’s a state school. It’s good. _Really_ good. He didn’t think he’d get spared a thought, the weird kid with a single mom and a heart of gold, but the scholarship alone is—

_Well._

He should have already packed.

\---

So he does.

The drawers, the nightstand, the bed—the one he has never shared with anyone else. The comic books with the hero he’d idolized, not because he reminded him of himself, but because he hadn’t. Their ears are the same, they’re both pale as ghosts, but that’s where the similarities end. What kind of hero comes from a broken home?

 _Packing, that’s right_ , he realizes, knocking himself out of his reverie. There’s a suitcase opened on his bed. He tosses shirts, pajamas, his good pants, the one blazer he owns from the thrift shop down the street.

The thing he’d saved for last, though, is the food cabinet.

It looms now, brimming with the things he’s collected over the years. And sure it’s moldy and stale and there are some things growing in there he can’t quite identify but Brain would probably be able to, but then he remembers Brain is three states away already in college because he was the one who skipped a few grades and got AP credit, and he’s the one who got out of this town and got away.

And instead Buster’s here in his home he’s known for years looking at the little pile of food in the glass case like some sort of strange terrarium and he wonders why he did it.

That’s not exactly true though.

There are two reasons:

The first: to remember the times when he’d gotten them. The croissant at a bakery in Paris the night he got off the plane to visit his father. The butter had been so creamy soft, the roll so flaky sweet. There’s a pizza slice from the school cafeteria, a banana from a summer picnic, some candy from Jack’s Joke Shop (that he’s not certain will ever go bad) a slice of banana bread from the school bake sale, a tapioca from a diner when his mother had come home one night and been too tired to cook.

The second reason is that they had been unwanted. Bruised fruit, day old bread. They would have been left behind.

He doesn’t leave things behind. But everyone leaves eventually.

He pitches the lot in the garbage, and zips his suitcase shut.

\---

There’s a week left until he leaves.

He can’t decide if there’s something he should be doing, something he needs to cross off like a bucket list, but it’s not as if he’ll never see Elwood ever again. His new school’s only four hours away. He can come home on long weekends and breaks and holidays.

But then why does this seem so final?

He calls Arthur, because that’s all he can think of to do. So they meet up in those treehouse silences and those Sugar Bowl afternoons, but the tree is drafty and the days seem longer now, or shorter, maybe, and the Sugar Bowl is soon overrun by kids he is sure he used to be like but now he can’t imagine he’d ever been that small.

\---

 _“She never used the money_ ,” he tells Arthur, the day before he’s supposed to leave. He wishes in that second he could be that eight-year-old boy again, subsisting solely on wonder and dreams and sugar cereal.

He never had to share the toys that came in the cardboard boxes, though. Cheap trinkets, stickers, plastic rings, hollow action figures, gummy wall climbers.

He’d have given them all up, though, for a sibling. He knows that now.

But it’s too late.

\---

The walkie is packed for move-in day, on top of a box of old comics and a desk lamp and his toothbrush.

He leaves it behind.

\---

The first semester lasts an eternity and a second, and still it is not enough time for him to adjust properly to the threshold of the rest of his life.

He flip-flops between never returning to Elwood again and staying there until he turns to dust because why did he ever leave behind the only place he has ever really known?

But the classes are enough to keep him busy, enough to drain him entirely so he ends every day dead on his feet, his spine stiff and his eyes twitching for want of rest.

Some days he gets a break—a free period between lectures, or maybe a class gets out early because of some faculty training.

He wanders the halls these days, sometimes, or sits in the library, or else sprawls outside on the too-green grass that once upon a time he would have declared to look vaguely extraterrestrial.

Today he finds himself in the cafeteria, in the mood for a muffin, or maybe a slice of banana bread. He eyes the glass case hungrily until something catches his eye.

A sliver of cake, not dissimilar to something they would have served in the school lunches back home. It’s got pink frosting in even whorls and a half a raspberry on top.

He swipes his meal card, the one he’d loaded with a few dollars after depositing a birthday check, and the student worker cheerily hands him the slice in a clear plastic box.

He sits down at the cafeteria table. There is noise around him, susurrating and echoing but not saying much of anything.

This moment is important. It means something, he thinks, but he can’t quite pinpoint exactly why.

Maybe it reminds him of Lakewood, and the child he used to be. Maybe it reminds him of the Sugar Bowl, and the friends he used to have. Maybe it reminds him of his father, and the freedom of buying something just for the pure joy of wanting it.

Maybe it reminds him of all those things, and none of them, too.

Maybe he is starting to realize that he has not left his old self behind. That he does not have to be defined by his past, but he can admit that it has shaped him. He has spent the last few months abandoning his identity in short, fierce bursts, like shedding winter layers, as if he’d hoped to find out what he was underneath.

But that has not been the right approach. He has always been there, no matter what he did or where he went or who he was with. The little kernel of himself has always been there, deep down. 

He doesn’t eat the cake. He saves it in a little corner of his dorm, on a shelf with his textbooks. Perhaps what he’d needed was a reminder of himself all along, in order to remember just who that is.

\---

The weeks following are filled with finals and harrowing studying and lazy games of Frisbee on the grass. He ducks underneath one in the hazy slope of midmorning, preparing to take his last test of the semester before break.

He’s returning to Elwood for a few weeks. It’s surreal to think about.

But he’s ready, now, even though he didn’t think he’d ever be. He’ll visit his mom, of course. Tell her everything she’s missed. He’s got a text drafted for Arthur filled with things he’s not certain he’ll ever be able to say out loud. He’ll go to the Sugar Bowl, and the treehouse, and maybe even Mill Creek Mall. He’ll visit Lakewood Elementary, too, maybe sit down on the swings that he used to spend hours on.

One more test to go, and then back to where it all began. Where _he_ began.

Elwood does not define him, he knows now. Nothing does.

But it is still a _part_ of him.

 _And_ , he likes to think—in the part of himself that is still that eight-year old boy in the dark, huddled under his flashlight-imprinted sheets and a walkie-talkie pressed into his fingertips—maybe he’s become a part of it.

**Author's Note:**

> I am genuinely shocked if you actually read this so congratulations and please leave me a comment just to prove you made it to the end <3


End file.
